Social media for athletes: LegacyChamp launches today

September 30, 2011

September 30, 2011- Social media is everywhere. There are social media outlets for everyone from 13 year old girls with Bieber-fever to ones devoted to academics and researchers. Earlier this year, five men with varied athletic backgrounds got together and decided that what the social media world lacked was a platform for athletes. This led to today’s launch of LegacyChamp, a site that combines fitness tracking tools with social media.

LegacyChamp is designed from the ground up for the sports minded user. Sure, you can tweet about how far you ran today or post on Facebook how you managed to achieve a new pose in yoga today, but those messages will soon be buried in newsfeeds by tweets about cute shoes or messages declaring that if you don’t report a status message, you are a communist that will have seven years of bad luck. Not at LegacyChamp. Think of them as friends with (athletic) benefits.

Similar to some other social media platforms, you can form groups based on similar interests. LegacyChamp Chief Operating Officer Gershon Blyden can tell you the value of a feature like this. Last year, Blyden and two friends were training for the Ironman 70.3 Miami. That journey was documented in the film ‘From Ordinary to Extraordinary’. Although the men had the same goal, they didn’t get to train together because of time and geography. They relied on phone calls and emails to each other for encouragement and motivation. LegacyChamp would have made this a lot easier for them. The site combines features found at Facebook and Google+ while retaining a unique, sports-centric approach.

The site has a number of different components that cater to fitness related businesses, coaches and even fantasy league enthusiasts. A CrossFit trainer could blast (the LegacyChamp terminology for a wide audience message) a workout of the day to people in his group and member can respond back with their results plugged into a template so it all makes sense (nice for those who are more jock than computer guy). It also keeps things, like achievements, in an easily findable manner. No more searching back through 4000 wall messages to find out how fast your buddy ran his last 5K.

Small clubs, even informal groups, could really benefit from a platform like this. When work or family make it impossible to train with your friends, you can still track your workouts together, so one quick glance will show how each member did on the same cycling route, despite the fact that the rides were done on different days.

LegacyChamp launches today. The video on the left will give you a good idea of how LegacyChamp works in more detail. Blyden told me that LegacyChamp will be releasing mobile apps for iPhone, Android and HTC platforms next month. Membership at LegacyChamp is free, so there really isn’t any reason not to visit the site and see if the platform could benefit you.

If you have questions, suggestions or stories to share, please send Alan an email. To stay up on triathlon news, events and articles, follow on Twitter @FLTriathlon.